Stoic Logic

Benson Mates (1919–2009) received his B.A. at the University of Oregon in 1941. His graduate study at Cornell University was interrupted by the Second World War, and he completed his Ph.D. studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1948. Barry Stroud and Hans Sluga, in their obituary of Mates, praised his "lasting contributions to philosophy, the history of philosophy, the history of logic, and the understanding of antiquity. His work was of the highest order: clear, precise, illuminating, thoroughly reliable, and always at the highest level of logical and philological expertise.”

His Stoic Logic, based on his Ph.D. thesis, first published in 1953 and then reprinted in 1973 with a new preface, “was one of the first works to open the way for serious study and proper appreciation of the Stoics as philosophers and logicians. Greater sophistication in mathematical logic made it possible for Benson to demonstrate clearly for the first time the intricate ways in which the logical ideas of the Stoics were well in advance of those of Aristotle and in many respects closer to our own. The book remains a landmark in both fields.”